AlexanderPorter

Truth or Consequences

A speculative documentary about a small desert town, a spaceport, and the people who live there.

Watch the film ↗
Period
2020
Status
Complete / Archived
Form
Feature documentary
Truth or Consequences — Official trailer

The project

Anchored in observational documentary footage filmed over three years, the film weaves together archival, virtual reality worlds, an improvised score by Bill Frisell, and a speculative premise based on the very real spaceport located just outside of town. These intertwine to create a lyrical meditation on progress, history, and how we navigate a sense of loss within ourselves and a changing world.

Documentary field notes

During editing, Hannah and I felt the spaceport was setting the limits of the film. Its power and promise sat outside the town, shaping every story around it. We opened a series of structured conversations with residents and artists, borrowing from community-organizing practice. Those conversations asked what people wanted the project to make possible and grew into the Meteoric Arts & Film Festival, held in town in 2019.

The film's virtual worlds grew from the documentary footage. I exported frames and reconstructed Yvonne's trailer, George's museum, Philip's trailer park, and the spaceport through photogrammetry. Yvonne's trailer came first. The model remained fragmentary, its missing surfaces fixed by the limits of the footage. After Yvonne died during production, moving through it gave those gaps the emotional weight of memory. We returned to the footage and rebuilt dozens of scenes with the same forensic attention.

I joined the reconstructions into a surreal main street, then performed a continuous walk through it in VR using a virtual-camera system built with Elliott Mitchell. The walks recur through the film as echoes. Their position shifts across the edit, moving from pre-echoes toward memory and finally unwinding through the town in reverse. Hannah cut each day while I built the worlds. I watched most nights, and we talked through changes together.

What others saw

“This speculative framing, an improvised soundtrack by guitar maestro Bill Frisell, and Alexander Porter’s evocative photogrammetry all contribute to a singular, beautiful and immersive nonfiction work.”— Mandy Rose, Immerse News
Immerse NewsImmersive Highlights 2020
“one of the best documentaries that came out in 2020”— Peter Keough, The Boston Globe
The Boston GlobeDoc Talk: Irish Famine Remembered, Black Holes Investigated, Truth or Consequences (the town that is)

Process studies

Improvising A Film Score

Hannah projected groups of scenes from the evolving edit while Bill Frisell improvised in the studio. We returned to the footage with the recordings and continued editing, changing the images and music together.

Playing to the Footage
01 / 03

Bill Frisell — Composer / Improvising Performer Hannah Jayanti — Director / Editor

  1. 01 / Starting point

    How could Bill Frisell improvise to the film while its edit was still open?

  2. 02 / How it worked

    Hannah grouped motifs from the evolving edit and projected the assemblages during recording sessions. Bill played to the images, and we returned to the footage with the music's new emotional and rhythmic possibilities in mind.

  3. 03 / What it opened

    The recording sessions produced a score already connected to specific images. Returning to the edit with that music changed the timing and selection of the scenes around it.

Virtual Reality Worlds

Footage gathered while making Truth or Consequences became source material for incomplete three-dimensional reconstructions of places in town, including Bullocks grocery store, George’s museum, Yvonne’s trailer, Philip’s trailer park, and Spaceport America. The resulting point-cloud worlds carried the gaps, gestures, and instability of their source images into the finished film.

Virtual Reality Worlds: Trailer Park
01 / 07

Virtual Reality Worlds creatively led by Alexander Porter, with Hannah Jayanti, Elliott Mitchell, and Claire Hentschker.

Purpose-made press image of George’s museum from the opening of Truth or Consequences, reconstructed as an incomplete point cloud with display cases and objects emerging from a black background.
Interactive 3D model · Loads Sketchfab
  1. 01 / Starting point

    We wanted to move back through places that had only been recorded by a handheld camera.

  2. 02 / How it worked

    We extracted frames from the documentary footage, reconstructed the locations through photogrammetry, placed the resulting models in a game engine, and used custom recording software to film inside them again with a first-person virtual camera. It was painstaking, forensic work from very imperfect sources.

  3. 03 / What it opened

    The camera could move through the reconstructed places after filming. Missing surfaces, unstable edges, and shifts in perspective remained visible because they came from the handheld source footage.

The Speculative Premise

Truth or Consequences imagines commercial space travel as an ordinary fact of the town’s near future. We found that premise while reworking an early cut.

A fragmented virtual landscape stretches across pale desert terrain.
Speculative premise landscape
01 / 03

Hannah Jayanti — Director and Editor. Alexander Porter — Co-writer and VFX Creative Director; collaborator on the speculative premise and formal approach.

  1. 01 / Starting point

    The early edit placed too much weight on the spaceport and flattened the lives around it.

  2. 02 / How it worked

    Hannah and I went back through the early edit and loosened the spaceport's role as plot engine. We treated commercial space travel as something that had already happened, which made more room for the footage and the people in it to set the structure.

  3. 03 / What it opened

    Removing the spaceport as the film’s plot engine gave more screen time and structural weight to residents’ daily lives, accounts of the town, and imagined futures.

A Film Becomes a Festival

Truth or Consequences extended beyond the screen through a year of conversations with artists and residents. Those relationships became Meteoric, a free three-day festival of screenings, workshops, installations, performances, public forums, and shared meals in 2019.

Panoramic view of Meteoric participants seated in a circle outdoors in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
Panoramic view of Meteoric participants seated in a circle outdoors in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
01 / 04

Meteoric was co-created with artists and residents in Truth or Consequences. Alexander Porter — Co-founder and Co-organizer. Hannah Jayanti — Co-founder and Co-organizer.

Moving imageMeteoric // Teaser
  1. 01 / Starting point

    How could the relationships formed while making the film take public form in town?

  2. 02 / How it worked

    Beginning in 2018, we held conversations with local collaborators about the forms an event in Truth or Consequences could take. The festival distributed activity across the town and invited residents, visiting artists, and audiences to gather around films, performances, workshops, installations, discussions, and food.

  3. 03 / What it opened

    Meteoric brought the film's relationships back into town as a public event, giving residents and visiting artists time to meet around work and meals.

Moving image

Interviews move through a reconstructed desert

The trailer follows the film between observed life in town and places rebuilt as photogrammetric sets.

Selected recognition

International Film Festival Rotterdam

Bright Futures Competition | Nominee

Santa Fe Independent Film Festival

Best New Mexican Feature

My role

I co-wrote the film and served as VFX creative director and photogrammetry lead. The official film site describes the virtual worlds as creatively led by me. I built a virtual-cinematography process for reconstructing places from documentary frames, including Yvonne's trailer, George's museum, Philip's trailer park, and the spaceport. We placed the models in a game engine and built custom recording software so we could film the spaces by walking through them in VR. The gaps preserve what the archive cannot supply.

Support & distribution

Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program logoTribeca Film Institute logoTrue/False and Catapult Rough Cut Retreat logoWomen Make Movies logoPoints North Institute logoGenuine Article Pictures logoJerome Foundation logoNew York State Council on the Arts logoCreative Culture at Jacob Burns Film Center logoPuffin Foundation logoArch + Bow Films logoSentient.Art.Film logo

Selected credits

Alexander Porter
Co-Writer, VFX Creative Director, Photogrammetry Lead
Anne Yao
Assistant Editor, Archival Researcher, Post-production Supervisor
Bill Frisell
Composer
Claire Hentschker
Additional Visual Effects Creative Direction & Photogrammetry Reconstruction
Elliott Mitchell
VFX & Virtual Production Technical Director
Hannah Jayanti
Director, Producer, Writer, Editor, Cinematographer, Sound
Linda Dodwell
Executive Producer
Maida Lynn
Executive Producer
Mary Lampson
Consulting Editor
Sara Archambault
Producer
Scott Hirsch
Post-production Audio, Re-recording Mix, Sound Design

Links & presentations

Interactive extensionAn Artifact

A film became an explorable world.

Community-led public formMeteoric Arts & Film Festival

The documentary returned as a public gathering.